I don't like the idea of plutonium subcription

(#4315) Feature Closed: Answered billing dms embeds media meta migration packaging performance plugins theming video voice

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Comment by mesub
mesubMod 1 vote
Status changed from Under consideration to Answered
Hello, and thank you for your feedback. It should be pointed out that, in many cases, the free tier of Fluxer is a lot more generous than the Discord's free tier. Infrastructure and staff time is not free, so there does need to be a sustainable way to keep main instance going, as well as fund staff time to advance the FOSS mission. There was a similar post (which is not public), that had the following response from Hampus (most of this still applies to your post):
I'm open to feedback around things like these for the Fluxer.app instance, however, but I decided to start out very close to Discord Nitro in how the pricing was structured such that I could gain goodwill by making some features free when I can subsidise it by other revenue streams (businesses paying for isolated Fluxer instances as a SaaS offering, commercial licensing of the codebase, donations from the FOSS community, and potentially creator monetisation on the Fluxer.app instance down the line).
Fluxer absolutely wants to give you full freedom, and I've tried to make improvements where I could over Discord's Nitro offering for the hosted instance that I provide (which isn't free to provide). There are more ideas floating around to make the free tier more powerful to get you a taste of freedom without jeopardising my ability to monetise the instance to continue on the fully FOSS development of this platform and continue prioritising self-hosting.
TL;DR: Things may change as other revenue streams emerge, but I've chosen a defensive approach for now so that I can instead make some things more generous down the line on the hosted instance of Fluxer if I know this works out.
If you're able to describe your alternative funding model in detail, the team would be happy to consider it where practical.